


Built in grief

by Lolymoon



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Backstory, F/F, general warning for non explicit mention of sexual abuse and miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 09:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12230562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lolymoon/pseuds/Lolymoon
Summary: "She wants you. She asked for you. You look around the room in the dark, and you can thinkours, as long as your eyes skip over the evidence of Sam’s presence, evidence that would ruin your fantasy of belonging, and sometimes you look at Annalise in her sleep, and you couldn’t dare think it when she’s awake, fearing she’d known, but you whisper to yourself, low and frightened,mine."After Annalise came back from Cleveland without child and with new trauma, something began to build between Bonnie and her, shaped from the wreckage of their lives.





	Built in grief

**Author's Note:**

> My first work for this fandom ♥ let me know what you think?

She was never soft, but she was made of a hard you could not break. Something flexible and sprightly, swift as a fir branch.

She was never easy, gentle and kind. She was warm, and intense, and inviting, and boiling, wrapping around you like steamed water, comforting you with her heat, her quiet tide, blurring your eyes with longing instead of tears.

She was never soft, but she hardened further when she came back from Cleveland; she was cracked. Fire turned lava, lava turned ashes, dry, asphyxiated, and brittle. 

 

You know—you  _ know _ —that people can survive anything.

You also know that there’s no telling what exactly is going to survive.

 

Annalise barely tolerates anyone’s presence hovering around her for the next few weeks after her return home. She doesn’t snap—doesn’t need to—doesn’t boss her students around like she used to, doesn’t take on any case. She locks herself up in her room and drowns baby cries and phantom shards of glass in hard liquor.

 

Sam tries. That’s all he ever did, but even years of studying Annalise had never helped him brush against the core of her, her unlocking. His attempts had culminated in a defeated and quiet encouragement to ask Ophelia to come visit her daughter for a few days—to which Annalise had stated, unimpressed, that she would throw what’s left of herself through the window if he dared so much as call her mother to tell her about the baby.

 

He leaves her alone then. They all do.

 

Except you.

 

.

 

Bonnie comes and goes through her bedroom as if it’s but a second office, as if she’s her assistant or her maid rather than one of her interns who should have been more concerned with surviving through her first year of law school rather than bringing coffee and vodka to a woman petrified with bitterness.

 

Annalise allows it. She allows it, because Bonnie walks into the room as if she belongs there, no hesitation, no questions, only quiet, humble efficiency.

 

Annalise soon figures out that she doesn't mind, and why.

 

While everybody else’s presence grates on her nerves like a physical ache, Bonnie slips through unfelt. She's different.

 

Bonnie is different because she learned how to  _ not be _ ; how to fit so seamlessly with her surroundings for survival that she blends comfortably in the background of Annalise’s mind like the steady, transparent sound of rain.

 

“You’re the only one who hasn’t said you’re sorry,” she tells her one day, staring out the window while Bonnie is busy working on an essay, her laptop precariously balanced on her knees as she sits crossed legged in a corner of Annalise’s bedroom.

 

She does that sometimes, too. Just stays there, a shadow that never grows with the decline of the sun.

 

“I didn’t think that was something you’d want to hear. I know I didn’t.”

 

Bonnie’s voice is toneless, her face bent over her screen, the stillness of her fingers on the keyboard she only sign she's stopped to answer.

 

Annalise has turned on her chair to look down at her, her hands folded over her knees, her fingers absent-mindedly scratching the terrycloth bathrobe that has seen better and brighter days.

 

“I’d guessed. You gave too good advice not to have been through this yourself once. How old were you?”

 

“Young,” Bonnie answers with a quick glance up and an odd detachment that one could mistake for indifference but that Annalise has learned to read as lack of empathy for herself.

 

“Miscarriage?”

 

“Gave it away.” 

 

.

 

She doesn't ask you any more questions that day, and you don't offer anything else.

 

“It was your father's,” Annalise says two days later, an affirmation, and you nod, unable to read her tone today, to know whether or not she's in a mood to hurt or to listen. 

 

Not that it changes anything. You'd still tell her.

 

“Did he force you to keep it?”

 

“He was against abortion, but I would have found a way if I’d wanted it gone.”

 

“You didn’t?”

 

Annalise’s hands still in your hair. She insisted on you sitting at her feet while she slouched on the bed and “kept her hands busy”. She’d been muttering peevishly about slippery, straight thin hair, and you’ve kept silent, content to stay put and bear the harsh tugs of Annalise’s impatient fingers against your scalp.

 

You wait until she pulls on your hair again to answer.

 

“I used it. To protect me. He wouldn’t touch me while I was pregnant. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen him ashamed of what he was doing.”

 

There’s a silence that stretches between their breaths, until Annalise takes a fist of your hair and pulls your head to the side to look into your eyes.

 

It frightens you, to be so close that you could count each lash framing her bottomless eyes, that you could brush at them with a finger—but she smiles, just an upside pinch of her lips, and her approval makes you warm.

 

“Once you know how to use people you’re halfway safe.”

 

She loosens her grip and you feel your pulse beating against your skull, a sharp, focused pain where she pulled most insistently on your hair.

 

“You’d look good with short hair.”

 

.

 

“Do you ever feel guilt?”

 

They’re in the kitchen—a first since Bonnie started hanging out in her bedroom like a hungry stray, a change that their orchestrated choreography of domesticity doesn’t acknowledge as Annalise chops vegetables for a late lunch while Bonnie cuts careful, small bits of chicken. 

 

Their bodies lull themselves to the easy rhythm of mundane life—but Bonnie didn’t hide her hopeful look in time when she was greeted by the sight of Annalise out of bed and bustling around the kitchen. 

 

The idea that it means she’s getting  _ better _ —that she’s somehow moving on, accepting, and that Bonnie condones that—makes Annalise want to tear into her and break her to pieces.

 

“Guilt?” Bonnie asks, as she slowly sets her knife down.

 

Annalise barely hesitates.

 

She feels entitled to hurt what she can also heal.

 

“About your baby. Bringing it into a world where nobody wants it, using it to save your own skin—do you ever think about what happened to it?”

 

Bonnie rarely looks anyone in the eye, sometimes out of shyness, sometimes out of inability to care enough about the interaction to do so.

 

But the look she gives Annalise is upfront, slightly taking the woman aback by its quiet kind of fierceness.

 

“She.”

 

It almost calms her down. “Had a name?”

 

“Not from me.”

 

Bonnie reprises her slow, methodical slicing of the chicken. Annalise stares a little longer, waiting for her to be done, and she grabs the plate to throw the chicken in the pan with oil, the vegetables joining it soon after. 

 

The food is sizzling when Bonnie speaks again.

 

“Were you relieved when he died?”

 

She’s been almost expecting it, for some reason, since she brought up guilt and Bonnie repeated the word with a weighted lilt. 

 

“It’s so presumptuous of you. Thinking you can get away with asking me something like that.”

 

“Who else is gonna ask?”

 

There’s a hot pan within her reach, days of vodka-coffee diet in her nerves, blood-curling grief in her veins, but not the explosion she was expecting. Her rage deflates, unsustained, as she reaches the moment she’s been pushing for.

 

She turns off the gas, and keeps her back to Bonnie. Someone else’s eyes are not needed for this. She’s only facing her truth. At last.

 

“No. I wasn’t relieved.”

 

The next words are easier after this. “I acted like I didn’t want him, like something would go wrong, because that’s how it’s always been. I was guarding myself against it so I wouldn’t suffer as much when it would fail again. But it didn’t work. I pushed him away, and it still hurt like hell.”

 

Drops of liquid salt fall over the chicken and vegetables, pushed aside by the oil.

 

“I would have been ready. That’s when I realized. I wanted him, and I would have been ready.” 

 

There’s a hand on her shoulder and it’s not too heavy to bear.

 

“You would have,” Bonnie softly says in her ear, and her gentle breath brushes over Annalise’s skin like a wisp of absolution she’s too wary to believe in.

 

.

 

She’s already started to get out of the house. You’ve already cut your hair. It had taken a few weeks for the baby ghost to start haunting the walls of the house, as if Annalise’s attempt at living again had awakened his resentment. 

 

It’s only in nightmares at first, nightmares she didn’t have after the accident, nightmares that took their awful time to come to her at the moment she least expected them.

 

Sometimes, she asks you to spend the night, too, when Sam is away. 

 

As you hold her hands through gasps and moans and tremors, you can’t help the wild beats of your heart in your barely breathing chest. 

 

She wants you. She asked for you. You look around the room in the dark, and you can think  _ ours _ , as long as your eyes skip over the evidence of Sam’s presence, evidence that would ruin your fantasy of belonging, and sometimes you look at Annalise in her sleep, and you couldn’t dare think it when she’s awake, fearing she’d known, but you whisper to yourself, low and frightened,  _ mine _ .

 

The first time she throws you a bundle of linens in your arms and calls it a baby, you know you’ve reached the balancing high in your relationship where she needs you as much as you need her, and it’s not right, and it’s all you have, and who are sane people to judge?

 

“—can’t believe my sister dropped him off without even a phone call. I’m not her fucking baby-sitter. You hold on to him while I go take a shower, okay? I’ll be quick, I have a thousand things to do that needed to be done yesterday—”

 

“Take your time,” you say softly while Annalise pulls her nightgown above her head and throws it on the floor. “I got this.”

 

She looks at you, naked save for the purple silk covering her sex, and she walks over, her eyes fixed on the empty bundle in your arms.

 

You see something shift in her face from manic restlessness to quiet distance.

 

“He won’t be here when I’ve finished, will he?”

 

You shake your head, slowly. But you don’t open your arms to let the lie fall—you see in her eyes that she still sees it.

 

“And you?”

 

There’s not even a second of hesitation in your voice.

 

“Always.”

 

She gives you this look—like she pities you, somehow, and disappears into the bathroom.

 

She feels sorry for you, she thinks you captive, hogtied in the web of her splintered life.

She doesn’t understand—couldn’t accept that you would die before trying to sever that bond that you’ve ached for more than anything in your entire existence. 


End file.
